communication

3 articles · All tags

• The Optical Telegraph: Semaphore Networks Before Electricity
  How 18th-century semaphore towers relayed coded messages hundreds of kilometers in minutes — the first practical telecommunications network, and its brief dominance.
• Fiber Optics and Total Internal Reflection
  How light is trapped inside hair-thin glass strands by total internal reflection — the physics that carries the internet as pulses of light.
• The Printing Press
  The movable-type printing press developed in fifteenth-century Europe, and its effects on the spread of knowledge, literacy, and communication.